The Drowning Man and the Woman Who Saves Him
by SpaceNugget11
Summary: Otose does more than that though — Gintoki, Otose


Note_I think Gintoki and Otose's platonic (MASSIVE EMPHASIS ON THE PLATONIC) relationship is criminally underrated. This two-chaptered narrative will humbly try and right that wrong. Sort of.

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i. Gintoki, the Drowning Man

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For the past three months, it's been the same thing over and over again. Different iterations—hot irons, bullwhips, bludgeons, water—but the crux of it always stays the same: pain.

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"Have you had enough yet, Shiroyasha?" A man screams in his ear, and before Gintoki can tell him about the giant booger hanging from his nose, they shove his head underwater. It's filled with ice, and the cold hits him like a slap to the face. After a while, they yank him out sputtering and coughing. Gintoki has to hand it to them; they're experts—pros! Timing it just right so that as soon as a breath of air begins to tickle the back of his throat, he's shoved under again, reprieve dangling just beyond the reach of his fingers. Good job fellas, because it's _actually_ fucking torture.

This is repeated many times over, so that by the twelfth time, everything's spinning, and through the thick haze of pain, he can't tell when to hold his breath or when to breathe. One moment it's air, and the next, a mass of black bubbles boiling angrily around him. The water gushes up his nose and down his throat, swamping his lungs and his brain. His body thrashes violently against the incoming flood, against the slow drowning, but not even the white demon can do much against five men and iron chains.

At the end of it, he can't stand on his own, so they drag him back to his cell with his knees trailing on the ground behind him. They throw him in, the bars slam shut, and he lies on the cement floor waiting to slide back into sleep's abyss. If he's lucky, he won't have any dreams.

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When his executioner appears in front of his cell in the dead of night, a crooked grin cuts across Gintoki's face. They weren't supposed to lop his head off until tomorrow morning; it seems his appointment with death has come a little earlier than scheduled. He's punch-drunk from hunger and exhaustion, and it must be bad because he's talking to ghosts. He thinks, _Hey, hey, hey, what's this? I guess the Shiroyasha's getting some VIP treatment, tonight. Aren't I lucky guy, right, Sensei?_ He sits against the wall of his cell, his arms limp on the ground besides him, the bruises and open sores pulsing dully in the back of his mind. The end is nigh, and he's actually a little relieved; he still hasn't been able to tell his interrogator about the massive booger in his nose, and it's been driving him insane having to see it every day without being able to say something.

His executioner, a stout man with the grizzled countenance of a bear having just woken up from hibernation, turns to take a seat on the cement floor, leaning back against the prison bars. The man doesn't say a word, and Gintoki can't really bring himself to give a damn. After a long bout of silence, and Gintoki wondering if the man's just trying to discreetly pick out a wedgie, the executioner speaks, his words coming slowly as if he's drawing them up from the bottom of a dark shaft.

"When people sin and degenerate into demons, the only beings capable of turning them human again are humans; that's why I have no right to cut you." He pauses here as if to consider what he's just said, and then nods slowly as if in agreement with himself. "A demon has no right to cut a fellow demon."

He rises abruptly. Keys jingle, a latch clangs open, and slowly, the bars to the cell groan open.

"You made a promise, didn't you?" he asks.

Gintoki looks blankly at the open door, his thoughts miles away on the little island he's created to get away from everything. _I did?_ He doesn't move. Long after the executioner leaves, Gintoki remains with his back against the cold walls of his cell, taking in the stench of piss and excrement as he stares listlessly into freedom. _Congratulations Sakata Gintoki_ , _you did it,_ he thinks, trying to scrounge up the necessary enthusiasm for the occasion, but his fingers just scrape against the bottom of his heart and come up empty.

He feels very, very tired.

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The world outside is canvassed in snow, and Gintoki leaves one kind of prison to enter another one locked in winter. White flakes float down from the flat, gray skies and he guesses it must be around January, though it's hard to tell since the days have started running into each other; time grows smudged and blurred when you're behind bars.

He's dressed in his finest prisoner's regalia, but the thin linen is just one big joke against the sub-freezing temperatures, so he crosses his arms to try and hold in the heat and does the only thing he can ever seem to do right: he walks forward.

The cold cuts like a thousand razorblades, and Gintoki imagines the soles of his feet freezing to the ground. He imagines needing to rip his foot away with the next step, leaving a sheet of skin pasted to the ice behind him. He would leave blood in his wake like a trail of red blossoms blooming in the snow, and the pain would probably be horrific. He wonders if he would bleed out and die, if the blood loss would be massive enough to finally make his heart give out, make the red organ finally throw its hands up in exasperation and cry "Fuck it, this is it, I'm done- _fucking_ done! DONE-ZO!" Lately he's been putting through quite the grinder and between killing his teacher with his own hands and losing an entire fucking war, he wouldn't blame the poor bastard for throwing in the towel.

His heart, he means.

But the bottom of Gintoki's feet stay attached, his heart keeps chugging away at life, and eventually all his parts goes so numb that he can't even pretend he's going to die an excruciating death. More likely, he'll end up passing out somewhere and slip quietly in the great beyond, and no one will be the wiser until spring comes and melts the layer of snow off of his corpse. It's not the flashiest way to go, especially for a guy who's life had played out against a grand, sweeping backdrop of intergalactic war; against the thunderous cry of clashing armies as they met on the battlefield; against the screams of dying men and aliens as blades spilled their offal onto the muddy ground; against the blaze of so much blood, guts, and glory, dying of hypothermia behind some trashcans would be a little embarrassing, but Gintoki figures his whole life has been one great big embarrassment anyways, so he might as well take it to the grave, ha ha. Melodrama just cramped his style anyways.

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Gintoki ends up in the graveyards. Shouyou had found him walking amongst the dead, and now he's return; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The prodigal son leaves to take on the world, gets his ass whooped, and comes back like the beaten dog everyone knew he was. You were right all along, Father Death, you old fucker.

He spies a particularly large headstone sticking out over the city of tombs like an unsightly skyscraper. _Man, that guy must've been one cocky son-of-a-bitch,_ Gintoki thinks and decides it's perfect for him too. He had lived a blazing life of blood, guts, and glory after all and there was no way he'd die an embarrassing death behind some trashcans. He was the Shiroyasha, damn it, crank that melodrama up to fucking eleven!

"Hope you don't mind sharing some of this real estate, buddy," Gintoki says and takes a seat in the snow behind the eyesore of tombstone. He leans back against the stone, unable to feel the ice-cold surface against the frozen skin of his back. He folds his hands in his lap and notices that his pinky-toe might be turning black, but that's okay since he's sure he can do without it in the afterlife.

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End file.
